My Freelancer Deleted Code

Dang! My Freelancer Deleted Code

What to do when code gets deleted or tampered with by a freelance worker?

The answer to this question is restore from backup (that is what I would do if my freelancer deleted code or files). Oops, I did not back up! Hmm, well let that be a lesson for next time.

My Freelancer Deleted Code

How do you prevent such mishaps in the future?

If you have been a victim to such misfortunes (Probably 99% of the time, something like this only happens by mistake), here are a couple of points to consider:

Create a daily schedule to backup your entire system (make sure you know how to restore files).

Communicate with your virtual employee on daily basis if you can. I find that keeping close contact with my virtual team shows that I am aware of their most recent activities and displays my passion for the project. When I play an active roll and show that my heart is in it, mistakes tend to lessen due to shared interests and enthusiasm to produce results.

It is important that you research your virtual employee reviews and gather as much information about the professional before you contact them. This gives you leverage. Once the freelancer is contacted, you can see if what they say matches what you have researched. This process can help you weed out the irresponsible before you actually hire them.

Know your platform, front and back end. If you are not tech savvy you should hire someone you can trust (locally) that can act as a buffer between you and your virtual worker. You might be able to hire someone locally at reasonable rates to do minimal monitoring of your application while hiring someone remotely to do the actual heavy lifting. In the long run you still are cutting cost. Having this knowledge enables you to foresee code that might break or fail, for example memory limits, or potential security breaches, etc.

Ideally you will want to create a staging server and grant access to files there. It took me a couple of times getting this right after a freelancer deleted code and files on accident of course. Your staging server or site is basically a duplicate of your live site. All test and updates are performed on the staging server. Once changes have been approved you can upload or update to your live site.

Whether or not you grant access to sensitive files or functions of your business to a remote employee is up to you. But if you make sure beforehand that whatever you give access to, you have implemented a simple and quick restoration policy.